'Oject of inspiration' A Constructivist lesson

Brainstorning a design idea in 3D

This exercise was given to a year 10 Visual Design class who have been instructed through subjective and cultural exploration of the social conventions and various traditional practices of designing and wearing that ‘special garment’.
The focus for their “Object of Inspiration” is this year’s WAVE Production: “The Jade Paladin and the flying Garuda.” Students are invited to display inspirational ideas and investigate new technologies.
Through exercises like these students will develop a sense of being artists responding to the WAVE production criteria and establish their own expressive relationship to the work they will create.
The final aim of this lesson is have the students (in groups) create an entry for the WAVE production.
The instructions given to the class were in groups of 3 or 4 create in one lesson a costume on a mannequin in response to the Wave categories. They could use anything in the room as long as they didn’t break anything and remembered where it came from.
The focus was on silhouette.

The students thoroughly enjoyed this lesson it came after a few theory and static lesson so it was well timed. So far this term the students have created design inspiration collages on the different sections for the WAVE production and the directors of the show have given an overview of the ideas behind the show.
So they came to this exercise with reasonable background knowledge.
It was interesting to see how this group of 13 female students formed dynamic groups that all worked well together. The students had 1½ hour’s to create and pull down their creations.
After giving the instructions I pulled back and observed the students interacting in their groups, taking photos and encouraging when they started to slow down. If I did this lesson again I would have a bunch of interesting objects placed around the room and not let them just focus on fabric.

This was quite a constructivist lesson I had been reading a lot about constructivism so it was at the forefront of my mind.
This lesson was driven by the impulse to focus on discovery learning allowing learner centred experiences and activity through social interaction.
It provided the students with an opportunity to work in groups in a collaborative learning environment. Through this the students got an experience of how different people work with in a group. They focused on creative problem solving, nutting out their ideas in 3D form which gave them a greater scope to work with rather than being limited by pen and paper.

One of the sighted limitations of the constructivist approach is that it is time consuming for the teacher to create a well-scaffolded lesson. The importance of providing a sufficient scaffold should not be underestimated it is the make or break in facilitating constructivist learning.

A Constructivist lesson continued...

On reflection this lesson I created could have had a stronger scaffolding to help the students focus on the silhouette. I have given an exercise to year 11 Visual Design students where they had only random objects and muslin, which provided a limited focus on the colour and fabric choice. The year 10 Visual design students got caught up on focusing on the fabrics, which made the focus of the lesson shift a bit.

Group work can be very productive but can also disadvantage some groups. Some groups have highly motivated students who will help to focus the group keeping them on task creating exciting work. Then you have students who dominate groups making the others feel second best and unable to express their creative ideas. Then you can get groups of totally unmotivated students who will try to get away with doing nothing, letting down their groups.

Discovery learning at best is suited to the self-motivated student where as the less confidant, unexperienced or lazy student can fall behind and get lost and bored. Discovery learning has to be monitored by the teacher to make sure the student doesn’t start to focus on something that the teacher didn’t intend.

Overall this lesson was well received and encouraged the students in their next step of inspiration. They found the groups that they went on to design pieces for the WAVE production with. It encouraged them to play with brainstorming in a physical form rather than being limited to the pen and paper.

They all had a lot of fun and were very pleased with their final products.
It was fascinating to see the ideas blossom and the dynamic of the groups un fold.

ACTION RESEARCH

A (usually cyclic) process by which change and understanding can be pursued at the one time, with action and critical reflection taking place in turn. The reflection is used to review the previous action and plan the next one. (Dick 1997)

http://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/learning/literate-futures/glossary.html

Action research is a fancy way of saying let’s study what’s happening at our school and decide how to make it better place. Emily Calhoun (1994)

Action research is a three-step spiral process of: 1 planning which involves reconnaissance;
2 taking action; 3 fact finding about the results of action. Kurt Lewin (1947)

Action research aims to contribute to the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to the goals of social science by joint collaboration within a mutually acceptable ethical framework. (Rapoport 1970: 499)

Action research is a method that as a Design teacher I am always using. When I plan a class I will make the item that I have set as their project, (“planning which involves reconnaissance”) the I will teach the lesson, (“taking action”), then I study the results of the lesson through it’s effectiveness, evaluating the way I have constructed the lesson, the way in which they have responded to the instructions and the results of their projects. Then I start again with the action of how I would do it differently when teaching the same lesson or another one. As a teacher we should be going through this process everyday.
As a learner one also follows this cyclic process of ‘action research’.
This whole blog has been just that Action Research.

DISTRIBUTED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

"Distributed learning is not just a new term to replace the other 'DL,' distance learning. Rather, it comes from the concept of distributed resources. Distributed learning is an instructional model that allows instructor, students, and content to be located in different, non-centralized locations so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and place. The distributed learning model can be used in combination with traditional classroom-based courses, with traditional distance learning courses, or it can be used to create wholly virtual classrooms."

http://techcollab.csumb.edu/techsheet2.1/distributed.html

‘A distributed learning environment is a physical learning space that has been enhanced or extended by technology to include virtual features and capabilities’

Children’s learning happens in a distributed learning environment, an environment that incorporates the family, society, school culture, classroom and peers among other things. As an educator one needs to be aware of the different environments the students are coming in contact with and by taking this into account one can focus on the whole well being of the student rather than looking the school culture and classroom as an isolated facet of their learning environment. Thus creating a school system that encourages the possibility of deeper, higher order learning.

‘Computers can be a part of this environment, opening up a whole new Distributed Learning Environment within it’s self.’

Constructivist Theorist

PIAGET

Piaget identified four stages of learning, which he believed where ‘universal (that is, they apply to everyone);…and that they are invariant (that is, unchanging), meaning that the order in which children pass through the stages can not be varied.’(From the ‘Education Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003)

1 Sensorimotor: (birth to about age 2)
2 Preoperational: (begins about the time the child starts to talk to about age 7)
3 Concrete: (about first grade to early adolescence)
4 Formal Operations: (adolescence)

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/piaget.htm


After reading Piagets theories one can appreciate the insight this man had by reflecting on ones own experiences of learning and teaching. Like most theorist there are the both the strengths and limitations, the ‘fors’ and ‘againsts” that could be discussed at great length but I would like to look at the relevant factors that promote higher learning in ICT in education.

Piaget ‘emphasised the importance of active problem solving’, a well-constructed Webquest can be an effective way for students to learn concepts by inquiry and problem solving, with the aid of the Internet and other resources. Webquests are a clever way to help educators filter the great expanse of the Internet into bite size chunks that can be evaluated for their relevance and quality. “Webquests are inquiry activities that present students with a challenging task, provide access to a range of resources (most often accessed through the Internet) and scaffold the learning process to promote higher order thinking.”(March, 2001) [From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003])

Piaget ‘was particularly interested in peer interaction as a means for children to expand their ideas, to overcome conflicts and achieve shared solutions that are more mature than individual efforts (Brown, Metz and Campione, 1996 [From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003]))

I have seen this theory realised through my observations of a Year 8 (14 year old) digital media/ film/ art class especially the male students. Year 8 at the best of times are hard to keep quite let alone focused, interested and committed. But through the use of programs such as I Movie, Final Cut Pro, Garage Band and PhotoShop in a art theory / art making class these students are producing articulate, postmodern, creative, innovative and stimulating work.
This Social Constructivist learning environment has “encouraged learner-centred experiences and activities”, “provided opportunities for learners to work together” and “assisted novice learning to develop expertise” thus achieving the deeper order learning that it is postulated ICT can facilitate.

Vygotsky

“One of the many advantages of computer-based learning resources is their capacity for facilitating individualised learning. This is evident in behaviourist-style drill-and-practice programs, but computers may also function as scaffolds that identify a learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ and foster their cognitive development (Salomom, Perkins, and Globerson, 1991)

“ZDP- the distance between children’s current level of competence on a task and the level they can achieve with supporter guidance. [From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003]

Vygotsky also stressed the “importance of social interaction in learning” [From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003]
After reading Vygotskys theories I believe one of the important things he observed was that learning and development occurs within a ‘sociohistorical’ and ‘sociocultral’ context.
Taking that into consideration educators need to very aware of the way ICT is used within today’s society. As a teacher of teenagers they themselves are one of best benchmarks in discovering what is new, interesting and relevant to them in the ICT world. For most teenagers computers are an everyday reality through which they express themselves. They are not afraid to use them, navigating their way rapidly through any new programs that they encounter. These children can be MSNing, Downloading songs, whilst writing a word document without even a second thought. Today’s students are multi-taskers of the highest order so to bring ICT in as an effective educational tool the teachers have to form well structured scaffolding and relevant, achievable outcomes within the lesson.
The Postmodern society is the ‘socio-historical context’ in which we teach.

“Postmodernism is away of thinking which suggests that everything can be explained and interpreted in a number of different ways due to the changing nature of what is true and how we accept facts” (Revised HSC Visual Art in a month-Craig Malyon)

Postmodernism posses many question non more prevalent than ‘ownership’. In a world where copying information is as swift as a click of the mouse the issue of ownership becomes very blurred, especially when you look at it through the ideals of Postmodernism.
As an art movement Postmodernism revolves around the idea of appropriation, recontextualisation, and eclecticism deeply challenging traditional modes of thinking.
This is a ‘Brave new World’ in which we live where new rules have to be written to accommodate the rapidly morphing realm of Cyber Space. This becomes an issue when setting students tasks to research information, which these days will be done primarily on the Internet. First there is the question of the quality of the information with which they have easy access to through such search engines as ‘Google’ (a search engine that lists there websites by popularity [how many hits]). Then once the information is found there’s the quick copy, cut, paste method of creating a document, this is an easy and tempting road for some students and an even less productive method than copying straight from a book. At least the student will have had to read the information as it was copied which isn’t the case when using a computer.
Computers have many quick, effective and resourceful qualities as a cognitive tool but they have just as many negative ones and as an educator it’s best to find a balanced and enhancing way to integrate them into education.

“Vygotsky argued very strongly that the children and the environment interact to mould cognition in a culturally appropriate way” [From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003]

Howard Garner

Howard Garner states in this article “Multiple Intelligences after twenty years” written in 2003 that MI (Multiple Intelligences) ‘should not in it’s self be an educational goal. Educational goals need to reflect one’s own values, and these can never come simply or directly from a scientific theory.’

http://pzweb.harvard.edu/PIs/HG_MI_after_20_years.pdf

After reading this article I feel I have formed a better understanding of how Garners MI could be used to help formulate lessons.
The way in which instructions are given is a great example of how teachers could take in to consideration the different ‘intelligences’. A well formulated interactive website uses among other things text, graphics, photos, animation and video to instructed and inform the student of the task and information thus considering some of the intelligences.

Using this web site, http://www.mitest.com/omitest.htm, teachers could test their classes to establish what intelligences the class is made up of, the teacher could also use observation of different class activities to form a even deeper understanding of this.

Bruner

Bruner like Vygotsky observed that knowledge was constructed not in isolation but in a ‘social context’. He was a structural theorist, who believed ‘knowledge is most effectively gained by personal discovery’ and that teachers would engage students in a ‘active dialogue’ and guide them when necessary so that students would progressively build their own knowledge base, rather than be ‘taught’.

In the year 8 film class of which I have already written about, I have observed these theories in practice. These students have been guided by film makers / teachers who have implemented the students personal discovery in the finer points of the art of film making.
By encouraging, supporting, and providing the scaffolding, the ‘hows’ in using the programs, the teachers have helped the students understand the cognitive tool and facilitated the possibility of higher order learning in the realm of ICT.

It is surely the case that schooling is only one small part of how a culture inducts the young into its canonical ways. Indeed, schooling may even be at odds with a culture's other ways of inducting the young into the requirements of communal living.... What has become increasingly clear... is that education is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise. (Jerome S. Bruner 1996: ix-x)

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm

For me this sums up the way in which all education should be considered. In an ideal world Education would be about the whole wellbeing of the a child who is living within a conscious community whose ideals and expectations are interconnected.

A constructivist approach...

Welcome to our Computer generated world!

Here in Cyber SPACE this BLOG has been created to facilitate my ‘higher order learning’ on the topic of ICT in education. Within this BLOG I plan to start the discussion on the ‘relevance of the constructivist approach to education’ with in the realm of computer technology.

What is a Constructivist learning environment?

“Constructivists believe that knowledge is ‘constructed’, that the thinker is both mentally and physically active in this construction and that the sociocultural context in which knowledge construction occurs provides the thinker with invaluable resources, support and direction.” (Fosnot, 1993; Phillips, 2000; Wells and Chang-Wells, 1992)
From the ‘Education Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003

At best a Constructivist Learning Environment acknowledges the rapidly changing world we live in, and by doing so allows students to become active learns within the new modern world that they see surrounding them.
This point is illustrated affectively in the realm of ICT in education. As an educator one must be constantly updating ones skills in ICT to keep up with the upcoming ‘Digital Natives’, whose knowledge supersedes most older generations from generation ‘Y’ and below. But even with sufficient skills ICT is still a new realm in which educators need to find the best possible way of facilitating higher learning.
I think the key to using ICT effectively in the classroom is to ensure that as a cognitive tool the computer is used to enhance learning rather than becoming the ‘object of construction’ (McClintock, 1992[From the ‘Educational Phycology-Krause, Bochner and Duchesne 2003])

The Constructivist approach to education “focuses on cognition as a collaborative process”(Rosoff, 1998); computer technologies when effectively used promote both interactivity between machines and user, and between users’. (Pachler, 2001)